We consider the relationship between economic activity and intervention, including monetary and fiscal policy, using a universal monetary and response dynamics framework. Central bank policies are designed for economic growth without excess inflation. However, unemployment, investment, consumption, and inflation are interlinked. Understanding dynamics is crucial to assessing the effects of policy, especially in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis. Here we lay out a program of research into monetary and economic dynamics and preliminary steps toward its execution. We use general principles of response theory to derive specific implications for policy. We find that the current approach, which considers the overall supply of money to the economy, is insufficient to effectively regulate economic growth. While it can achieve some degree of control, optimizing growth also requires a fiscal policy balancing monetary injection between two dominant loop flows, the consumption and wages loop, and investment and returns loop. The balance arises from a composite of government tax, entitlement, subsidy policies, corporate policies, as well as monetary policy.

Geoffrey West is Distinguished Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute and a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He holds a B.A. from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Stanford where he was on the faculty. His interests have been in fundamental questions from elementary particles to scaling laws in biology and social systems, and on developing a science of cities, companies, and global sustainability. His research includes metabolism, growth, aging, sleep, cancer, ecosystems, and the accelerating pace of life. He has received many awards and was on Time’s 2006 list of “100 Most Influential People in the World.” His work was cited by the Harvard Business Review as a breakthrough idea of 2007.

Decentralized distributed network structures have much social and, more specifically, political potential, as emphasized in a number of previous publications of the authors. They are successfully used for carrying out important political projects, including, e.g., the development of non-governmental organizations that form a part of civil society and perform ideological and consulting functions. This work outlines social/political strategies aimed at optimizing the use of network structures in the present-day society. Inevitably, decentralized networks have to deal with non-network structures such as centralized hierarchies (including bureaucracies) and (quasi-)markets.

When the US investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, triggering the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression, a broad consensus about what caused the crisis seemed to emerge. A bloated and dysfunctional financial system had misallocated capital and, rather than managing risk, had actually created it. Financial deregulation – together with easy money – had contributed to excessive risk-taking. Monetary policy would be relatively ineffective in reviving the economy, even if still-easier money might prevent the financial … »»

Presidential Address to the 17th World Congress of the International Economic Congress, Dead Sea, Jordan June, 2014. This address is based in part on joint work with Bruce Greenwald and Martin Guzman. Helpful discussions with Adair Turner, particularly on Part III, and with Rob Johnson, Martin Guzman, and Arjun Jayadev, are gratefully acknowledged. I am indebted to INET for financial support, and to Feiran Zhang, Debarati Ghosh and Ruoke Yang for research assistance. The first two parts of this lecture are a development of ideas presented earlier in Stiglitz (2011, 2013). For a more extensive list of references, see those papers. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

This work is concerned with distributed decentralized network structures that are characterized by cooperative interaction among their parts (nodes). Although such decentralized cooperative structures exist in various kinds of systems, emphasis is placed on their role in biology and the social sciences. In human society, network structures are of considerable potential importance in terms of social/political technology: they enable us to establish efficient creative research laboratories, to modernize the educational system, and to establish horizontal interfirm alliances and intrafirm networks. Of special interest in terms of such organizational projects are biological organizational patterns (network paradigms), i.e., specific network scenarios that work in various biological systems and can be efficiently used to set up network structures in various spheres of human society. Importantly, the development of network structures in human society promotes the implementation of the basic principles of socialism in it.

Decentralized distributed network structures have much social and, more specifically, political potential, as emphasized in a number of previous publications of the authors. They are successfully used for carrying out important political projects, including, e.g., the development of non-governmental organizations that form a part of civil society and perform ideological and consulting functions. This work outlines social/political strategies aimed at optimizing the use of network structures in present-day society. Inevitably, decentralized networks have to deal with non-network structures such as centralized hierarchies (including bureaucracies) and (quasi-)markets. The successful spreading of network structures in society and harmonious interactivity between different types of social/political structures are promoted by creatively combining (1) the top-down strategy implying that network structures are officially granted political rights and given a legal status (preferably articulated in the country’s Constitution) and that special mediator organizations are established to regulate network-hierarchy-market interaction and (2) the bottom-up strategy based upon setting up exemplary network structures, demonstrating their potential usefulness in various social/political spheres, persuading socially active people into joining the networks (using online technology). In this work, it is emphasized that the spreading of decentralized distributed network structures in present-day society actually results in the transition to a new social system. This emergent network society implements the principles of self-governed socialism in the field of economics and promotes the regime of network meritocracy in the political sphere.

Introduced by the late Per Bak and his colleagues, self-organized criticality (SOC) has been one of the most stimulating concepts to come out of statistical mechanics and condensed matter theory in the last few decades, and has played a significant role in the development of complexity science. SOC, and more generally fractals and power laws, have attracted much comment, ranging from the very positive to the polemical. The other papers (Aschwanden et al., 2014; McAteer et al., 2014; Sharma et al., 2015) in this special issue showcase the considerable body of observations in solar, magnetospheric and fusion plasma inspired by the SOC idea, and expose the fertile role the new paradigm has played in approaches to modeling and understanding multiscale plasma instabilities.

As we educate ourselves, our colleagues, and the public at large about emergence, I would like to suggest two challenges for SFI that relate to its potential role as a world leader in science education. First, given the importance of emergence as a unifying paradigm for science, can the SFI community help spread the word about emergence to learners of all ages? Could we, for example, create an online course that introduces middle and high school students to science through the study of emergent behavior – and helps them develop an emergent perspective on the world around them? Could we increase the focus on emergent behavior in our existing educational programs, beginning with our middle school programs, and infuse this kind of thinking into our signature summer schools? Second, can we create an online “Gateways Registry”? This would be an accessible, jargon-free catalogue of existing organizing concepts and principles that have been successfully incorporated into models that explain emergent behavior. We would then add new ones as they are discovered. In my view, it is the Institute’s responsibility to capture and catalogue what we have learned about gateways to emergence for the benefit of future generations of scientists. — David Pines

This book focuses on network structures in biological systems and in human society. The term “network structure” is used in the literature in at least two different meanings. The broader meaning (denoted by this author as a network sensu lato) refers to any system composed of nodes (vertices) connected by links (edges). In terms of this interpretation, the analytical tools that deal with centrality measures, clustering- and community structure-related criteria, small-world behavior, and other network characteristics have provided important insights into the organization and functioning of various objects, including biological systems and human society.